


Choices

by dreamshesees



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers: Age of Ultron
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-28 23:14:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3873502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamshesees/pseuds/dreamshesees
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place after Avengers: Age of Ultron.</p><p>I had a lot of feelings about this movie and I needed to fix some things and explore some others. Maximoff twins, Pietro-centric. Not finished, no idea where it's going, read at your peril!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Pietro woke up in the Cradle and thought they had buried him alive.

He was assured, after all the chaos died down, that they had put him in very much dead.

But first the chaos. Wanda, the first face he saw when the Cradle opened, her voice rising above all the others, above the hiss and beep of machinery.

Relief, and a warmth that blossomed over all the pain, as she threw her arms around him and he sat up and put his arms around her, holding her while she sobbed into his shoulder, and he buried the sting of his own eyes into her hair, while a woman's voice somewhere in the room kept repeating to no avail, "Let him /go/ he's still healing and you're-"

Eventually Wanda did let him go, and he let her go, but only because he started to get dizzy with the pain and because white-gloved hands were prying his increasingly weak arms away. He saw red, dappled on his skin, and the raw holes it seeped from.

"Oh," Pietro said quietly, in Sokovian. "Did I get shot?"

Then he passed out.

It was like that for the next week, waking and sleeping much against his will in what he later learned was the medical bay of the Avengers headquarters. Waking and sleeping and Wanda's face always there. Sometimes other faces, too, particularly that red and green one, the robot, who gave him a start the first time he saw him but Wanda explained that it was alright, that he had helped, and furthermore he had yet to try to build a robot army to destroy the human race.

"Ah, well," Pietro said to her. "That's very generous of him."

Hawkeye had survived, he learned, as had the boy, and everyone else. It was a small miracle, to have such utter destruction, the threat of a true world extinction event, and the only casualties were machine parts and Tony Stark's mighty ego.

"We need to go," Pietro told Wanda one night, lying down because he didn't have the strength to get up, because he had pushed himself too far in physical therapy, like he did the day before, like he always did, and he felt like a drained husk now, heart thrumming at a still unfamiliar pace. He wondered, also not for the first time, the depths of what had been done to them. What they had agreed to, for the sake of winning a war he wasn't sure they were fighting any more.

"I know," Wanda said quietly, her hands clasped around his. "But we can't."

Pietro stared at those hands a long time before he was willing to admit, "I know."

#

He watched Wanda train, while he struggled to run. Dr. Cho had him on the treadmill every day now, and he had worked his way up to a light sprint, every muscle and bone aching to go faster. Wires rustled from where they were taped to his chest, machines beeped, and the doctor scribbled, and watched him, and scribbled some more.

Through the tall wall of windows he saw his sister's hands fill with red, and her shaky lift off the ground.

He smiled a small private smile, and when Dr. Cho let him, he ran faster.

#

"You're welcome here as long as you need to be," Captain America told them. "But at some point you have to make a choice."

This wasn't the first time they had heard as much, but it was the first time they had a proper, sit-down talk about it. Steve's office was spare and empty, little-used, but the new compound was still under construction and full past brimming and the over-formal space was one of the few places they could talk in private.

"We know," Wanda said. She and Pietro sat with their chairs pushed together, hands linked. "We want to join the Avengers."

Steve regarded them both quietly, in that way he had, neither pitying nor cool. The way that, along with his unflagging honesty and forthrightness, had brought Pietro to grudgingly trust him over the past month. Not trust him to have the twins' interests first, but trust him to be decent, and honest about his intentions.

It was novel, and it was a relief.

"You've got no obligation," Steve was starting to say.

"We know," Pietro said. "This is where we need to be."

Neither of them said what was part of it, but not all of it: What choice did they have?


	2. Chapter 2

Pietro thought he'd put his days of collapsing and waking up behind him. Then he woke up in the short-clipped grass of the training field, Natasha shining a light in his eyes.

"He's up," she said.

Dr. Cho was there, then, and kneeling beside the spy. "What happened?"

Pietro shook his head, sick and dizzy, and let them loop their arms around him to get him onto his feet.

#

"Low blood sugar," Dr. Cho said. "Your metabolism is still accelerating. This might account for some of the loss in strength you mentioned, too, your muscles are breaking down when your body needs calories."

"I eat /all/ the time," Pietro protested. He did. More every day. He was always hungry.

"We'll need to try to calculate your base metabolic rate," the doctor said. "And find a solution from there."

#

He started having seizures.

"Just little ones!" he assured Wanda.

"/Just little ones/?" She shook him.

The doctors kept doing their research, kept feeding him things that fell on the spectrum from foul to vile. He got better, and he got worse, and he got better.

"What did we do," Pietro said one night, alone with his sister, lying facing her in bed. They had their own quarters, but since he had woken up and been freed from the medical bay they'd spent most nights like this. Hands linked, Wanda falling asleep, and him not.

Wanda shook her head, clasping his hands tighter. She had been doing so well. She could fly now. He liked to watch her, rising high above the compound, the red of her coat like a battle flag. But he knew she was afraid, too. Afraid as her training took her farther and farther from the compound, because that was the only way it was safe. Not for her, but for everyone else.

"What did we let them do to us," he said, and the question went unanswered when they went to sleep.

#

"Hey, Maximoff."

Natasha liked talking to them in Russian. They spoke it alright, as good as their English, though she made fun of their accents. Pietro and Wanda looked up from their lunch, off in the corner of the cafeteria.

"Boy Maximoff," Natasha corrected, but with a smile for Wanda as she sat down next to the other woman. She passed a box across the table to him, small and white. "Merry Christmas."

"We're Jewish," Wanda said.

"Oh. Then surprise, it's a present."

Pietro opened the box. A handful of little pellets lay inside, like animal feed. He frowned at her.

"Doctor warned me they were pretty foul. But they should do the trick. Cover your nutrient intake for the day, plus about half your calories."

Pietro picked one up and popped it in his mouth before the words of protest were out of Wanda's. He knew what she was going to say, but he didn't care. He didn't trust them either, not wholly, but.

But what choice did he have.

He felt better that day. And he felt better in the days that came. The seizures--a potassium and sodium imbalance, Dr. Cho said, on top of his low blood sugar--stopped.

Pietro felt a little surer that he had woken up alive.


End file.
